OpenAI‘s ChatGPT is experiencing a global outage, impacting users who are increasingly using the AI chatbot to create Studio Ghibli-styled animated avatars. The disruption is causing widespread errors across the ChatGPT app and its API services. OpenAI, which receives backing from Microsoft, has stated that it is working to resolve the issue.
OpenAI says it is working on a fix
OpenAI acknowledged the disruption, saying, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.”
“We’re currently experiencing issues,” the company added.
According to DownDetector, a website that monitors online service outages, hundreds of users reported problems with OpenAI’s services with a majority of them claiming problems with ChatGPT.
OpenAI Sam Altman says ‘GPUs are melting’ and ‘let the team sleep’
The outage comes amid the surge in popularity of ChatGPT’s Ghibli-style image generation, which also prompted a response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In a post on X, Altman asked users to “chill” on generating these images, citing the strain on the company’s resources: “can yall please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep”.
When a user suggested that limiting the model’s capabilities would deter users, Altman replied, “we are gonna do the opposite of nerfing it BUT still please chill out a bit.” He also defended his team against a suggestion to replace them, stating, “no thanks, in addition to building AGI this team is on trajectory to build the biggest website in the world from a cold start 2.33 years ago, best team in the world, it’s just hard.”
In a separate post, Altman also acknowledged the user enthusiasm for the image generation feature, saying “it’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt,” but also noted the strain on the company’s infrastructure: “but our GPUs are melting.”
In response to this, OpenAI is “going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won’t be long!”
